As a new month begins it’s time to look back and round up some of the most noteworthy social campaigns we’ve seen in the last 30 days or so.

This time it includes Burberry, Topshop, Peugeot, Paddy Power, Stonewall, Grant's Whisky and new Instagram ads.

Paddy Power is among the brands that will be speaking at Econsultancy's Festival of Marketing in November. The two-day celebration of the modern marketing industry also features speakers from LEGO, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and more.

I'm not looking at payment here, which NFC has been mired in, merely how the shopping experience can be enhanced.

I'll get a few things off my chest about what works and what doesn't. First, a super quick differentiation between the two technologies.

Near field communication (NFC) is capable of two way communication, so payment (a debit and credit) for example, or even in medicine (a tag in your skin could send vital signs to your smartphone), and it works only at short distances. NFC can be used more basically, to simply transmit set information to a phone or tablet.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been around for yonks, the tags only transmit information, to an RFID reader (an NFC enabled phone or tablet such as an Android can be used as a reader, but for an iPhone a separate reader is required). These tags have been traditionally used in stock control.

There's bluetooth low energy (e.g. iBeacons) in the mix, too. However, many of the uses of beacons have been for push messaging to customers.

In this piece I'm not going to be talking about geofencing which can be done with RFID, GPS or low energy bluetooth (iBeacons). I'll be focusing on active rather than passive engagement, though I'll discuss iBeacons in my conclusion (as they're rapidly taking hold in many of the same scenarios).

In the early days of social media luxury brands attracted huge followings simply because people liked to be associated with aspirational companies.

I naively thought that those days had passed, but it would appear that luxury fashion brands are still a big draw on social.

It could be that the likes of Chanel and Dior have outstanding content and are excellent at engaging with their fans, but I thought it would be interesting to see if they’re getting by on reputation alone.

According to data from Socialbakers, luxury brands account for four of the top six most-popular fashion labels on YouTube.

Victoria’s Secret is far and away the most popular (453,000 subscribers), followed by Chanel (250,000), Dior (124,000), Quiksilver (117,000), Burberry (110,000) and Louis Vuitton (74,000).

It covers transactions from browsing to buying and returning, as well as pre and post-sale service. For luxury retailers, this means more channels and more devices, across which quality, service and experience must be communicated.

The transition from bricks-and-mortar to clicks-and-mortar, although full of opportunity, is not without its challenges.

In addition to the generic challenges that come with updating a business model, the luxury sector, and indeed the department store luxury market, has its own set of unique challenges.